Did you know that the German fashion house Hugo Boss outfitted the Nazi SS during WWII? That many of the clocks in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction are set to 4:20, a.k.a. international tokers’ time? Or that actor Kevin Spacey’s dad was supposedly such an impassioned admirer of Adolf Hitler that…
The classic rock jams filtering through the stereo system at the Yard House in Desert Ridge are hand-picked at the corp’s Irvine HQ by none other than The Founder himself, Steele Platt, whom I imagine as a dead ringer for The Architect in The Matrix Reloaded. Dressed in white, with…
I was home alone, meditating in the buff after a particularly sweaty yoga workout, when he appeared to me in a blaze of glory: the four-armed, elephant-headed Hindu deity Lord Ganesha, that potbellied avatar of wisdom, success and prosperity, revered on the Subcontinent and elsewhere as “the remover of obstacles.”…
Like Scottsdale really needs another Ho, one more glamour gal about town who lives to slink sexily through Valley nightlife, turning heads, breakin’ hearts and bleeding wallets dry. And yet, the newly revamped Hotel Valley Ho, with its recently completed $80 million face-lift and its George Jetson-Googie-Mid-Century swankiness, is really…
Selective amnesia and creative revisionism run rampant this time of year, like social diseases in a pre-penicillin bordello. I can’t frown too much upon my comrades in criticism for wanting to repress the negatives and stack up the positives in their year-end catchalls like a pack of lily-livered Panglosses. I’ve…
Anyone remember Uptown 713, that ghastly excuse for a grub-ateria that once occupied a little shoebox-size space behind Apollo’s Lounge, near Seventh Street and Bethany Home Road? Believe me, it’s not worth remembering. The only reason I haven’t completely erased it from the memory banks is that after I wrote…
It’s as if jolly ol’ Saint Nick himself laid a massive Yule log right in front of my Xmas fir with a missive ordering me to burn, baby, burn. Sure, this time of year, most good little boys and girls are having sugarplum dreams of iPods and Xboxes, but I’d…
George Miller keeps the good stuff in a jug behind the counter of his small, nine-month-old Carolina-style ‘cue joint, Restaurant 28, in a Glendale strip mall on the southeast corner of 51st Avenue and Olive. If you tell him you hail from the Old North State, he’ll let you sniff…
When it comes to dining, or any other aspect of existence worth writing about, I consider myself simpatico with Ray Milland’s quip in Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend, where he riffs off a line from Thoreau, stating, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation: I can’t take quiet desperation!” Transcendence…
What am I to do with a restaurant so studiously unambitious as the still-neonatal Fenix Eatery and Bar, ensconced in the small, dowdy “Arcadia Village” shopping center at 40th Street and Camelback Road? I hear the rabble crying to me like they did to Pontius Pilate millennia ago, urging that…
The ghost of Bob Crane led me to Bobby-Q, though the star of the ’60s sitcom Hogan’s Heroes didn’t stick around to help me eat my ribs. I should explain that Crane’s brutal, 1978 homicide in a Scottsdale apartment complex has always been a subject of fascination for me, long…
Cave Creek might as well be the dark side of the moon as far as this city mouse is concerned. I know, I know. It’s scenic and all that crap, but in my book, any area so lacking in streetlights is the sticks. And as I wend my way up…
According to the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Anubis, the jackal-headed judge of the underworld, weighs the hearts of men against the feather of truth and justice. As long as the organ does not tip the scale, the deceased is granted immortality. But if the heart is too heavy with…
For some, the word “fez” might conjure up romantic images of the ancient Moroccan city of Fez with its walled medina and medieval mosques, the setting for Paul Bowles’ brilliant, intricate novel The Spider’s House. Others might picture my hero Sydney Greenstreet as Signor Ferrari, wearing a fez and swatting…
Regarding the fleeting nature of human achievement, I’m reminded of the words of that controversial icon of early cinema, director D.W. Griffith, who once stated, “Movies are written in sand: applauded today, forgotten tomorrow.” Some movies more than others, I reckon. Griffith’s sentiment also applies to great and not-so-great meals…
I’ve had it up to here with work, so I’ve decided to phone in my column from the thriving Mexican city in which I’m vacationing. I’m seated on a long, brown and green picnic table with clusters of Hispanic families and couples, all speaking so fast in Spanish that about…
If Gotham is the city that never sleeps, then culinarily speaking, Phoenix gets all its beauty rest and then some. The primary complaint I hear from freshly unpacked twenty- and thirtysomething transplants concerns the lack of late-night nosheries. And indeed, the pickings are slim here past 9 or 10 p.m.,…
Super Dragon, I know, sounds like one of those fantastic drawings Jon Heder does while portraying ultra-nerd Napoleon Dynamite in the flick of the same name. You know, like Napoleon’s “liger,” a cross between a male lion and a female tiger that, according to Wikipedia.org, actually does exist in the…
I have been to the mountaintop, and, yes, I’ve eaten it, because that’s just the kind of guy I am. The edible pinnacle of which I speak is as formidable as Mexico’s Popocatepetl volcano, and while devouring it, I felt like the food-critic equivalent of some intrepid mountaineer determined to…
Unless you have a tongue made of cast iron and a mouth lined with ceramic tiles, the clear noodle salad at Sala Thai Restaurant on 32nd Street, a quarter-mile north of Shea Boulevard, should set your gob ablaze like Los Angeles during the riots, and that’s at the “medium” level…
Are all restaurant chains doomed to suck eggs like Old Yeller? Not necessarily. It’s hard to find fault with a Chambord margarita from Z’Tejas, for instance. And I do occasionally get a craving for an In-N-Out burger or a roast beef sammy from Arby’s. Don’t even get me started on…
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory: That’s what — poof — appears in my cranium like a two-bit magician behind a puff of smoke as I walk back to my car from Vu, chef William Bradley’s chichi, yearling eatery over at the Hyatt Regency Scottsdale at Gainey Ranch. There’s one…
